Daniel C. Peterson's Blog, page 236

“It was a sublime moment”

    I share here a passage drawn for my notes from Susan Easton Black and Larry C. Porter, Martin Harris: Uncompromising Witness of the Book of Mormon (Provo: BYU Studies, 2018).  The background to this particular quotation is that, in mid-December 1869, Elder William H. Homer was returning to his home and family in Utah from […]

“Times of Reckoning and Set Times in Abraham 3”

    It’s Friday, so nobody should be completely surprised that, for the 414th week in a row, a new article has just appeared in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship.  This one is by Professor J. Ward Moody:   “Times of Reckoning and Set Times in Abraham 3”   Abstract: The […]

“Strictly upright”

    I share here some notes from Susan Easton Black and Larry C. Porter, Martin Harris: Uncompromising Witness of the Book of Mormon (Provo: BYU Studies, 2018), regarding the period when, his wife Caroline having finally left him in order to gather with the Saints in the Great Basin (as she had been waiting to do […]

Einstein’s “greatest blunder”

    Some passages that I marked in Alister E. McGrath, A Fine-Tuned Universe: The Quest for God in Science and Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009).   First, an obvious but extremely important point:   An empirical scientific method will always seek to inquire about natural causes; only a nonempirical metaphysical naturalism […]

Philo-Semitism, Vicarious Baptisms, and Me: A Retrospective

    I’ve now managed to locate the conversation (so to speak) about Holocaust victims and the Latter-day Saint practice of vicarious baptisms for the dead to which I alluded in yesterday’s post.  It occurred on Tracing the Tribe: The Jewish Genealogy Blog, and it commenced on 17 December 2006.  My participation there will serve to […]

Some Physical, Social, and Psychological Benefits of Religious Involvement

    I offer three more items from Paul McFate, 52 Good Reasons to Go to Church, Besides the Obvious Ones (Chicago: ACTA Publications, 2004) — a little book or booklet that I commend to you (though it may be hard to find).  Every single one of the three has been officially board-certified as appropriate […]

Will ANYBODY be saved on his or her own merits, without the Atonement of Christ?

    Quite a few years ago — I wish that I could find the actual discussion, but I no longer remember where or exactly when it was — I entered into an online conversation on a Jewish message board about the Latter-day Saint practice of vicarious baptism for the dead.  (A controversy had recently […]

James J. Strang and His Witnesses, More or Less Revisited

    I’ve long had a particular interest in the Witnesses to the Book of Mormon.  (The Interpreter Foundation’s Witnesses film project is an obvious outgrowth of that interest.)  Accordingly, I also have an interest in criticisms of the Witnesses.  This interest forms the background of a column that I published in the Deseret News […]

Four really challenging quotations

    First, I share two quotations from two very vocal atheists.  The first comes from Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, popular author, and emeritus Professor for Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford.  The second comes from one of the co-winners of the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics, Steven Weinberg:     The […]

Liberal Islam and Illiberal Islam

    I share, here, a couple of passages that I marked during my reading of Charles Kurzman’s very counterintuitive (and therefore very important) book The Missing Martyrs: Why There Are So Few Muslim Terrorists (Oxford: 2011).  Professor Kurzman is also the compiler and editor of the seminal anthology Liberal Islam.  He uses the term liberal […]